Obama Needs to Fire Some People

Dec. 11 (Bloomberg) -- When the Barack Obama administration
realized that its HealthCare.gov website was fundamentally
broken rather than merely glitchy, aides called former
management consultant Jeff Zients to fix it.

When the White House realized restive congressional
Democrats posed a serious threat to the health-care law’s
future, the president recalled Phil Schiliro, the White House’s
first director of legislative affairs, to safeguard it.

When Obama realized maybe this whole second-term thing
wasn’t going that well, he called in John Podesta, who had
served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, to fill a
vague, yearlong “counselor” role to help right it.

Obama clearly decided that the people nominally in charge
of his signature legislative achievement weren’t up to their
jobs. The rescue effort wasn’t led by Kathleen Sebelius, the
secretary of Health and Human Services, or Marilynn Tavenner,
head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The
legislative outreach isn’t being managed by Rob Nabors, who
previously served as the White House’s director of legislative
affairs and is now a deputy chief of staff, or by Miguel
Rodriguez, who currently serves as director of legislative
affairs (and appears to be mostly unknown on Capitol Hill).

All of which raises a question: If these people aren’t up
to the most important tasks of Obama’s second term, why haven’t
they been fired and replaced by people who are?

Though the site is working vastly better today than it was
two months ago, the debut of HealthCare.gov was a genuine
disaster. Specifically, it was a management disaster. CMS’s
information technology department botched its job as systems
integrator for HealthCare.gov. CMS management botched the job of
recognizing that CMS’s IT department was botching its job. The
failures cascaded from there, with HHS botching its oversight of
CMS, and the White House botching its management of HHS.

It wasn’t just the technical challenges of HealthCare.gov
that the administration managed poorly. The White House was
completely unprepared for the furor over canceled insurance
plans; that’s a political problem that Sebelius, a former
insurance regulator, should’ve seen coming.

The failures extend beyond the health-care rollout. Obama
wanted to nominate Lawrence Summers as chairman of the Federal
Reserve Bank -- or at least wanted the option to do so. But the
legislative affairs team failed to muffle dissension among
Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee (in fact, it seemed
like they failed to even try). Similarly, Obama wanted
congressional authorization to strike Syria. But he was on track
to lose a vote until a bout of seemingly extemporaneous
diplomacy by Secretary of State John Kerry provided an exit, via
trapdoor.

Somewhere in this chain of colossal, consequential
screwups, there are surely a few people who deserve to be fired.
The White House tends to dismiss such criticism. Indeed, Obama
aides pride themselves on rising above it, viewing it as
politically motivated or, when proffered by administration
allies, derived from a crude desire for retribution. There
might, at times, be truth to that. But firing and replacing
underperforming staff is also a key element of effective
management.

Of late, President Obama has shown a worrying preference
for ad hoc, patchwork solutions. The White House recognizes that
its health-care law hasn’t been well executed. That’s why it has
been throwing new staff at the problem. But the new arrangements
are temporary.

“From a management perspective, keeping people in place
and then layering more people over them does not solve your
management problems,” said Elaine Kamarck, founder of the
Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management.
“It just makes things more confusing.”

Take Zients, the guy who appears to have pulled off the
rescue of HealthCare.gov. He would seem to be an obvious choice
to manage the project going forward, perhaps by taking over HHS
or CMS. Instead, he’s expected to replace Gene Sperling in
January as head of the National Economics Council. For now, the
same people who botched the Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act are -- in theory, at least -- continuing to run it.

One White House excuse for keeping people in place was the
difficulty of the Senate confirmation process. With Republicans
filibustering most confirmations, a 60-vote supermajority was
required to fill politically sensitive jobs. Under those rules,
firing someone didn’t mean you could replace them with a better
candidate. It meant risking that the position would go unfilled.
Before Tavenner took over CMS, the agency hadn’t had a confirmed
director in more than seven years.

In November, Senate Democrats eliminated the filibuster
against executive-branch nominees. The White House now needs
only 51 votes -- a number Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can
easily deliver. President Obama now has a far freer hand with
which to staff the executive branch. The question is whether he
wants to use it.

It’s possible the White House is waiting until the health-care law is stabilized before seriously reassessing personnel.
But at some point, Obama needs to recognize that temporary
staffing and stopgap solutions are insufficient. His second
term, so far, has been broken rather than simply glitchy. He
needs to fix it.